Capture-Based Policies
Under a capture-based (or time-of-capture) policy, messages are retained based on the user’s group membership at the time the message was sent or received. In capture-based policies, message retention is independent from the user’s current role, and the policy governing retention does not change when the user changes group membership. This feature is useful if your organization is subject to regulations mandating the amount of time you must store email for employees in certain roles, such as accountants, sales representatives, or executives.
At the time a message is sent or received, it is associated with the specific capture-based policies that apply. Because these messages are stamped at time of capture, removal of a user from a group does not disassociate (or release) messages that have been associated with the policy. Alternatively, adding a user to a capture-based policy tags all messages received after the user has been added, but does not retroactively associate messages previously received under a different capture-based or membership-based policy.
Example: A user is initially a member of the Sales Group retention policy, which has a 50 day retention period. The user then transfers to the Assistant Group, for which the retention period is 20 days. Mail captured prior to the transfer will still be retained for 50 days. Mail captured after the transfer will be retained for 20 days.
NOTE
When users are removed from retention policies (whether manually by an administrator or because they have been marked deleted by the system), they are given a 30 day grace period before the policy no longer applies to them. This prevents messages from being immediately purged if a user is accidentally removed.
Be aware that the retention policy view will not show which users are pending removal during the 30 day grace period.
NOTE
If a message is stored under a Storage Management policy, it will not be purged even if it is eligible to be purged under a Retention policy. See Storage Management.